1. Introduction

Welcome to the USAID Adapt Asia-Pacific[1]
’s On-Line Sourcebook: Integrating Gender in Climate Change Adaptation Proposals. In accordance with the mandate of the USAID Climate Change Adaptation Project Preparation Facility for Asia and the Pacific (USAID Adapt Asia-Pacific), the Sourcebook focuses on climate change adaptation rather than mitigation. It focuses on the front end of the project cycle, specifically proposal preparation for accessing climate change adaptation financing. While many of the resources referenced are relevant across regions, we have used text boxes, case studies, and resource lists to highlight Asia-Pacific examples to support the work of country partners of USAID Adapt Asia-Pacific.

The Sourcebook’s primary audience are those individuals and teams who prepare large-scale climate change adaptation (CCA) project proposals. The Sourcebook provides the reader with tools to help answer the question, “How do we best go about incorporating gender considerations into our CCA proposal?”and not “Why should we incorporate gender considerations into our CCA proposal?”We start from the assumption that readers who use our Sourcebook already understand that gender issues are relevant to climate change activities but may not be conversant or feel comfortable with organizing gender data or elaborating gender issues and strategies.

Rather than reinventing the gender “wheel,”our online Sourcebook helps proposal writers more easily navigate the extensive online gender resources already available and places them in a CCA context. The majority of the document includes brief summaries of key points, highly useful tables from other resources, short text box examples, links to the best available resources, and compilations of project cases employing gender best practices. Because many CCA projects focus on one or more development sectors, we have summarized the extensive gender issues for climate-relevant sectors in Section 7 and provided short sectoral case studies of projects which provide details of how gender best practices were incorporated into design and implementation. Most CCA projects that focus on climate institutional frameworks, policy, and planning processes are still in design phase or early implementation;most have yet to elaborate sufficient, detailed documentation on their gender mainstreaming practices. When available resources were insufficient, we created original materials, including a checklist of gender options by CCA proposal section and a summary of global and Asia-Pacific resource institutions for CCA/gender advice and resources.

We prepared the Sourcebook so that it can evolve and be updated, particularly as more experience is gained with gender mainstreaming during project preparation and implementation. Users are invited to tell us, in Send Feedback, about what was useful and what was not and what gender impacts resulted from more gender-sensitive proposals. We hope that users will submit examples of gender-sensitive proposals, terms of references (ToRs) for gender specialists, and reports on gender mainstreaming actions and gender equity and climate adaptation outcomes during project implementation.

This sourcebook was originally developed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the USAID Adapt Asia-Pacific project. It is managed and hosted by the Asia Pacific Adaptation Network.